Speaker cabinet materials.


Just wondering what are some of the materials used in building cabinets for speakers? We all know of mdf and solid wood, but how popular is aluminum? Magico and Piega use it. Are there others that use aluminum? And what other materials are used? What about acrylic?
Acoustical wool and mass loaded vinyl is used inside, what else is used?
pedrillo
Vandersteen Audio model Five As and Quatros offer a unique constrained layer Damping system in a sophisticated multi enclosure.

When John Atkinson of Stereophile magazine measured their cabinets he said they measured insanely dead.
All of this is important yet the most dead cabinet in the world set up in a room with heavy bass nodes can defeat the purpose
The Room compensation feature of a properly tuned Five a and Quatro further allows the efforts of all this work to be appreaciated. ((take a listen...
John


I just picked up a nice pair of concrete speakers, the Rauna Frejas. These are a very heavy smallish 2 way with about a 5' woofer and a soft dome tweeter. So Far I relly like these. Other vintage speakers in my collection include Large Advents, Microaccoustic frm2 & 2a, DQ 10 and 20, Vandy 2ce, Polk Sda, and belle klipsch. I drive these with assorted vintage ss and tube electronics.
We use aluminum, baltic birch plys, mahagony bambo plys sometimes MDF if it needs to be painted. Corian works good, I find acrylics do not. We use Deflex, acousta stuff, wool,cork, silicon, rubber and carbon fiber in cabinets depends on design goal. Sometime hard rock maple for cabinet bracing again depends on design.
I forget the name, but I've heard fairly thin laminated wood speakers. The motivation was to build them in the same way as a violin is made and they did a good job with piano. Almost dipolar with all it's resonance.

The Krell LAT-1 was aluminum, wasn't it?

I think we're going to see more speakers made out some form of molded synthetic or compound in the future. Should make production less expensive.
Ngjocky Keep in mind the cost of a mold only way a molded cabinet would be cost effective to produce is in mass. So look to China;)